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Hands-on with Ubuntu’s new Unity netbook shell

Exclusive: Mark Shuttleworth has revealed a new user interface called Unity …

During a keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth unveiled a new lightweight user interface shell called Unity. The new shell is designed to use screen space more efficiently and consume fewer system resources than a conventional desktop environment. It will be a key component of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition and a new instant-on computing platform called Ubuntu Light.

The Unity environment eschews the conventional GNOME panel configuration. It includes a dock-like launcher and task management panel that is displayed vertically along the left-hand side. The top panel will house application indicators, window indicators, and the menubar of the active window. Moving the menu out of individual windows and into a global menu bar will reduce wasted vertical screen space, leaving more room for content.

Window indicators (windicators) are a new concept that Shuttleworth introduced in a blog entry last week. Designed to help reduce the need for status bars, they are interactive icon-based widgets that are specific to a window. They can be used to signify that an operation is being performed, notify the user of application events, or to control application status. For example, you could use a windicator to display a progress spinner when a program is loading data.

In the standard Ubuntu desktop user interface, windicators will be placed on the right-hand side of the window title bar—a region that is currently empty due to Canonical's decision to move window management buttons to the left-hand side in Lucid. In the Unity environment, the windicators and window management buttons will be able to merge into the top panel when the active window is maximized. This is yet another technique for increasing the amount of available vertical screen space.

The Unity environment utilizes several key components of the GNOME 3 user experience. It uses the Mutter compositing window manager and the Zeitgeist activity logging engine. The Unity launcher is built with Clutter, the same rich graphics framework that is used to construct GNOME Shell. Although much of the underlying technology is similar, the Unity user interface is a completely distinct implementation and doesn't use any code from GNOME Shell. Shuttleworth contends that the Unity launcher is intended to complement GNOME Shell, offering similar characteristics but specifically tailored for lightweight computing.

Ubuntu Light

One area of the desktop market where Linux is increasingly gaining traction is instant-on computing. Companies like Phoenix and DeviceVM offer embeddable Linux environments that boot almost instantly and are shipped by hardware vendors alongside regular Windows installations. These instant-on environments are generally designed to give users quick access to e-mail, web browsing, and instant messaging. Ubuntu Light is aimed squarely at that market.

Individual builds of Ubuntu Light will be tailored to specific hardware for OEMs, meaning that it will not be installable as a general purpose Linux distribution. Hardware vendors that adopt Ubuntu Light will be able to choose between the Unity environment and or a full GNOME desktop. It is intended to be used in a dual-boot configuration on Windows systems. Shuttleworth views this as an opportunity to boost the visibility of Linux in markets that have traditionally been Windows-centric.

"Over the past two years we have made great leaps forward as a first-class option for PC OEM's, who today ship millions of PC's around the world with Ubuntu preinstalled. But traditionally, it's been an 'either/or' proposition—either Windows in markets that prefer it, or Ubuntu in markets that don't," Shuttleworth said in a statement. "The dual-boot opportunity gives us the chance to put a free software foot forward even in markets where people use Windows as a matter of course."

Hands-on with the Unity prototype

Ars got exclusive early access to the Unity prototype, which we tested on a Dell Mini 10v. When the packages are installed, the Unity environment can be selected from the session list in the GNOME login manager. The prototype includes the side dock and a limited implementation of the top panel. Some key features, such as windicators and Zeitgeist integration, haven't been developed yet.

The sidebar dock has a honeycomb-style backdrop and displays application icons in colored rectangles. The dock shows the user's actively running programs and favorite software. You can pin an item to the dock and turn it into a launcher by right-clicking and selecting the "Keep in Launcher" item from a context menu. The launchers will stay even after you have closed the program, making it easy to launch again later.

When you click a launcher, a glowing light will pulse behind the rectangle while the application is initializing. When an application is running, an arrow will appear on the left-hand side of its launcher button. A second arrow will appear on the right-hand side of an icon to indicate when the program is active.

At this time, the dock offers no special handling for applications that have multiple windows. Each application is represented by one icon, irrespective of how many open windows are associated with the program. Unlike Mac OS X, windows in Unity don't get minimized to the dock.

Unity's primary mechanism for window switching is Mutter's Exposé-style window selector, which can be activated by clicking the Ubuntu logo in the top left-hand corner. You can also get an Exposé-style listing of just the windows that are associated with a specific application by right-clicking an application's dock icon. This will display a contextual menu with various options in addition to showing the filtered window selector.

The dock itself can scroll, offering a relatively graceful solution to dock overflow. You can scroll the dock by clicking inside of it and dragging up or down. The user can rearrange the order of items inside of the dock by clicking and dragging a dock item to the right and then moving it to the desired position. The different behaviors for horizontal dragging and vertical dragging are effective, but take a bit of time to get used to.

The Unity environment doesn't make it easy to launch additional arbitrary applications. It has no functionality that is equivalent to GNOME's Applications menu or the comprehensive category-based launcher that is used in the current Ubuntu Netbook Edition. As a stop-gap measure, the developers have included a launcher item that opens the /usr/share/applications/ directory in the Nautilus file manager.

The dock still has some bugs and doesn't always successfully track the open applications. There are a handful of other minor window management glitches that we encountered during testing, like some cases where it doesn't hide the open windows before showing the Expose-style selector. The issues, and the general lack of completeness, reflect the fact that the Unity environment is still a work in progress. Much of the missing functionality will be added as the Unity environment matures. Shuttleworth believes that Unity can be made ready for Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, which is scheduled for release in October.

"It will be an intense cycle, if we want to get all of these pieces in line. But we think it's achievable: the new launcher, the new panel, the new implementation of the global menu and an array of indicators," Shuttlesworth said. "Things have accelerated greatly during Lucid so if we continue at this pace, it should all come together."

Our test of the Unity prototype leads us to believe that the project has considerable potential and could bring a lot of value to the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Its unique visual style melds beautifully with Ubuntu's new default theme and its underlying interaction model seems compelling and well-suited for small screens. Users who want to get their hands on the prototype will be able to test it soon when it is published in a public PPA.

52 Reader Comments

This is fucking ridiculous: the stretching of screens to exaggerated extremes has now driven an OS maker to fuck up a useful UI paradigm to try and fix the reaming we're getting from the hardware makers?

Here's an idea: STOP BUYING THESE STUPID DISPLAYS and demand from the panel makers that they give back to us the vertical pixels they began stealing 5 years ago. Perhaps then we won't need to pervert the OS UI to make up for it.

Looks slightly cluttered with two toolbars up top and a taskbar to the side. Shouldn't they just move everything to the side and move all window management to that expose interface. They should also remove nearly all the notifications. This should be like a mobile experience with less taskbars and only network and battery notifications.

This new interface is looking good. I like the direction that Ubuntu is going. Apart from the normal tidying up that it needs which could be done by more full time employees, I really would like the Software Centre to move ahead in leaps and bounds. For Ubuntu to grow, the Software Centre needs to be fully featured as soon as possible.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition on my Dell Latitude 2100 and it is great, the best.

I tend to agree with the first comment, that is where are the vertical pixels these days? Web pages, documents are vertical not horizontal. I use Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook with Google Chrome just because I want the vertical pixels back. Anyway, that's the way things are going these days.

That dock on the left is nothing new. It's called Cairo, and has been around for quite a while. I've got it running on my Lucid desktop installation; Behaviour is the same (spinning icon for loading, arrow underneath icon to show running). Cairo doesn't behave well with VLC media player, if you're thinking of installing it.

I don't quite understand the Windicators thing; Chrome maintains the window controls on the right hand side of the title bar (a setting I've applied to my entire window manager; I like it that way). There are no other windows with special icons in the right hand side of the title bar in any other screenshots... Is it not yet implemented?

This looks very elegant overall. I'd appreciate an option to keep the OS elements off-screen, and slide them back on when I bump the cursor into the top or left edge. Small screens need every pixel for the app. I usually run applications full-screen on my System76 Starling, and even though all of my current apps support this, the OS should support it directly for consistency.

This is Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Netbooks are those tiny, inexpensive laptops which - by and large - come with 1024x600 screens. So, they're trying to move things from the valuable top and bottom screen real-estate to the left side, to give the user the maximum vertical space, right?

So explain something to me. With 90%+ of websites these days designed for a minimum display width of 1024 pixels, where are they planning to move the left dock to when they realize that horizontal scrolling in websites is a far worse transgression than vertical scrolling? Just look at the top screenshot - "Ars Technica, now with vertical AND horizontal scrolling!"

Most netbooks come with vertical (not horizontal) two-fingered scrolling. Most mice come with vertical scroll wheels. These two features have essentially eliminated any problems with vertical scrolling in websites. Am I missing something? As valuable as vertical screen real-estate is, at 1024 pixels wide, horizontal real-estate is infinitely more valuable.

So explain something to me. With 90%+ of websites these days designed for a minimum display width of 1024 pixels, where are they planning to move the left dock to when they realize that horizontal scrolling in websites is a far worse transgression than vertical scrolling? Just look at the top screenshot - "Ars Technica, now with vertical AND horizontal scrolling!"

I find it hard to believe there's no auto-hide feature for any of those taskbars. Ubuntu (desktop) certainly has it. Auto-hiding the taskbar is the first thing I do on any fresh OS install. Or when configuring a work computer if for any reason the IT managers decided I'd be better off with an always-visible taskbar.

A funny consequence of my particular taste is looking at the puzzled faces of certain colleagues who for any reason are using my computer and wonder where the taskbar is.

"With 90%+ of websites these days designed for a minimum display width of 1024 pixels"

Nonsense. The vast majority of websites I visit still know about fluid design, and re-flow to fit whatever browser width I choose. The ones that don't, I stop using after emailing them to tell them why. I suggest you do the same.

Nothing wrong with using paradigms from other UIs. I like my 1280x800 MacBook with the doc on the left, but with a bigger screen and multiple monitors, having menubars in application windows instead of across the top of the main display starts to make sense. Horses for courses, init?

"With 90%+ of websites these days designed for a minimum display width of 1024 pixels"

Nonsense. The vast majority of websites I visit still know about fluid design, and re-flow to fit whatever browser width I choose. The ones that don't, I stop using after emailing them to tell them why. I suggest you do the same.

I thought the point was to make Linux more like Windows/OS X to try and increase its place in the market because it makes it easier for users to migrate to it. Not change things around and force people to relearn the UI.

I clearly don't understand software patents. Doesn't Apple hold patents to a lot of these ideas? (dock, arrow running indicator, Expose, global menu??) How do they so blatantly rip it off and get away with it?

I clearly don't understand software patents. Doesn't Apple hold patents to a lot of these ideas? (dock, arrow running indicator, Expose, global menu??) How do they so blatantly rip it off and get away with it?

The dock wasn't invented by Apple; It was in Amiga before it was in Nextstep, before it was in mac OS.

The arrow indicator was likewise used before, as was the global menu.Mac OS has been essentially an Amiga ripoff for its entire life.It's fitting, because in its day, the Amiga was the computer of choice for graphics design.

*Linux* had "expose" first, with compiz fusion and beryl.Linux is also where OSX stole 'workspaces' from, and where most of windows 7's interface came from (KDE).

The moral of the story is that everybody uses ideas from other people, and twists them slightly to make them their own.Canonical's direction seems to be aping OSX, because most people only know OSX and Windows.Even those who know Linux will tend to only really know gnome or KDE.

When you look at old operating systems like Amiga, BeOS, and the like.... There are so many great ideas which are just now being 'invented'.

The dock wasn't invented by Apple; It was in Amiga before it was in Nextstep, before it was in mac OS.

When you look at old operating systems like Amiga, BeOS, and the like.... There are so many great ideas which are just now being 'invented'.

I had an Amiga. It had nothing like a dock, it had slightly awesome "screens" that you could have a fullscreen app and pull a window down though. Risc OS had a pretty full-featured "dock". Is a list of applications really that patentable?

The dock wasn't invented by Apple; It was in Amiga before it was in Nextstep, before it was in mac OS.

When you look at old operating systems like Amiga, BeOS, and the like.... There are so many great ideas which are just now being 'invented'.

I had an Amiga. It had nothing like a dock, it had slightly awesome "screens" that you could have a fullscreen app and pull a window down though. Risc OS had a pretty full-featured "dock". Is a list of applications really that patentable?

Whoops, my bad.I swear I've seen docklike parts in later amiga versions....The point still stands though, Apple did get the idea from elsewhere.A list of running apps with pinning shouldn't really be patentable; it's not so different from taskbar+quicklaunch after all, and there aren't very many other nice, intuitive, simple and visible methods for application management. (Gnome-shell being one of the rare few)

@ryan:Looks like I should have read before talking :$Regardless, compiz is far superior to expose, and does much more; it's highly unfair to say it's a copy.Apple tends to release an eighth of a feature, have their fans lap it up, and deride fully-featured and superior similar ideas as inferior copies.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

A dropdown menu instead of a dock? I kinda prefer shuttleworth's idea, it's similar to how I set up a netbook for my computer illiterate mother. Personally, I'm very excited by the windicators and placing the menu in the titlebar

@ryan:Looks like I should have read before talking :$Regardless, compiz is far superior to expose, and does much more; it's highly unfair to say it's a copy.Apple tends to release an eighth of a feature, have their fans lap it up, and deride fully-featured and superior similar ideas as inferior copies.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

Seems like a bit of an odd comparison. It's a bit like holding up the seat from a BMW and an entire Fiat car and saying "The Fiat is clearly better, because it does more." You should be comparing Compiz to Quartz and Expose to Scale. It's my experience that Expose works much smoother, and Quartz might not make windows explode in a fire ball, but it's a lot less rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and would choose it over Windows any day of the week (and frequently do at work), but I much prefer Apple's attention to detail. They don't tend to release features features until they feel as though they've got them RIGHT. So you get less features, but with a better implementation.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

All sarcasm aside, this is what I don't understand about Ubuntu/Canonical. They seem to be constantly in search of a problem to develop a solution for. Do one thing and do it well. Full-blown Ubuntu is fine on a netbook. Why do they feel the need to develop a "Netbook Remix"? Just detect the screen resolution, choose the optimal layout and then provide the user with a pop-up on the initial boot asking them whether they prefer to keep that configuration or want to resort to the standard desktop.

I can't understand what logic suggests that users want a radically different experience on a netbook from the one they get on a desktop. Plus, with the limited resources a company the size of Canonical has, doesn't it make sense to concentrate them on your flagship product, which is still far from perfect?

Seems like a bit of an odd comparison. It's a bit like holding up the seat from a BMW and an entire Fiat car and saying "The Fiat is clearly better, because it does more." You should be comparing Compiz to Quartz and Expose to Scale. It's my experience that Expose works much smoother, and Quartz might not make windows explode in a fire ball, but it's a lot less rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and would choose it over Windows any day of the week (and frequently do at work), but I much prefer Apple's attention to detail. They don't tend to release features features until they feel as though they've got them RIGHT. So you get less features, but with a better implementation.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

My apologies, I vehemently despise everything Apple, so I was unaware that the annoying minimise animations etc weren't done by expose. Apple's solutions feel half done and useless to me, as an example, the home and end keys don't even work on a mac, which is seriously irritating. That and the inability to change from the hideous brushed metal. Apple offer a one size fits all solution, and to many, they haven't gotten it right, they have it dead wrong. I'm looking forward to fennec, and flash 10.1..... Because I choose different.

Seems like a bit of an odd comparison. It's a bit like holding up the seat from a BMW and an entire Fiat car and saying "The Fiat is clearly better, because it does more." You should be comparing Compiz to Quartz and Expose to Scale. It's my experience that Expose works much smoother, and Quartz might not make windows explode in a fire ball, but it's a lot less rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and would choose it over Windows any day of the week (and frequently do at work), but I much prefer Apple's attention to detail. They don't tend to release features features until they feel as though they've got them RIGHT. So you get less features, but with a better implementation.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

My apologies, I vehemently despise everything Apple, so I was unaware that the annoying minimise animations etc weren't done by expose. Apple's solutions feel half done and useless to me, as an example, the home and end keys don't even work on a mac, which is seriously irritating. That and the inability to change from the hideous brushed metal. Apple offer a one size fits all solution, and to many, they haven't gotten it right, they have it dead wrong. I'm looking forward to fennec, and flash 10.1..... Because I choose different.

You seem to engage in platform contention an awful lot for someone who clearly has no knowledge of other platforms. May I suggest you quit while you're behind?

Seems like a bit of an odd comparison. It's a bit like holding up the seat from a BMW and an entire Fiat car and saying "The Fiat is clearly better, because it does more." You should be comparing Compiz to Quartz and Expose to Scale. It's my experience that Expose works much smoother, and Quartz might not make windows explode in a fire ball, but it's a lot less rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and would choose it over Windows any day of the week (and frequently do at work), but I much prefer Apple's attention to detail. They don't tend to release features features until they feel as though they've got them RIGHT. So you get less features, but with a better implementation.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

My apologies, I vehemently despise everything Apple, so I was unaware that the annoying minimise animations etc weren't done by expose. Apple's solutions feel half done and useless to me, as an example, the home and end keys don't even work on a mac, which is seriously irritating. That and the inability to change from the hideous brushed metal. Apple offer a one size fits all solution, and to many, they haven't gotten it right, they have it dead wrong. I'm looking forward to fennec, and flash 10.1..... Because I choose different.

Android and Linux are freight trains. Once they start moving, they haul. iPhone was ahead for a while, but now the HTC Incredible and a number of other phones are way ahead. I think Ubuntu just needs one good hit of public attention. Android was a slow burn and it wouldn't have gotten persistent attention if it weren't for Google.

Seems like a bit of an odd comparison. It's a bit like holding up the seat from a BMW and an entire Fiat car and saying "The Fiat is clearly better, because it does more." You should be comparing Compiz to Quartz and Expose to Scale. It's my experience that Expose works much smoother, and Quartz might not make windows explode in a fire ball, but it's a lot less rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and would choose it over Windows any day of the week (and frequently do at work), but I much prefer Apple's attention to detail. They don't tend to release features features until they feel as though they've got them RIGHT. So you get less features, but with a better implementation.See: HTC Desire vs iPhone

My apologies, I vehemently despise everything Apple, so I was unaware that the annoying minimise animations etc weren't done by expose. Apple's solutions feel half done and useless to me, as an example, the home and end keys don't even work on a mac, which is seriously irritating. That and the inability to change from the hideous brushed metal. Apple offer a one size fits all solution, and to many, they haven't gotten it right, they have it dead wrong. I'm looking forward to fennec, and flash 10.1..... Because I choose different.

You seem to engage in platform contention an awful lot for someone who clearly has no knowledge of other platforms. May I suggest you quit while you're behind?

I have plenty of experience with Windows and Linux, as well as deep pools of hatred for Apple. I fail to see any problem with that last post; Apple only give one option, and it's an awful one. If you want something other than what st Steve approves, you're out of luck.I know macs can run gnome and kde, but that's not the point. My point there was that mac OS is limiting, restrictive and overly simplistic, as is the iPhone OS.I fail to see this magic everyone seems to see in osx, because to me, it looks like a bad gnome theme.

"With 90%+ of websites these days designed for a minimum display width of 1024 pixels"

Nonsense. The vast majority of websites I visit still know about fluid design, and re-flow to fit whatever browser width I choose. The ones that don't, I stop using after emailing them to tell them why. I suggest you do the same.

Are you under the impression that your personal selection of websites is a fair representation of all the sites on the web?

Fluid design works in some sites, but not in others. For example, many forums do have fluid designs, since there's not much graphical design (at the block level) to get "distorted". Most sites that have fluid design are largely text-oriented (which is not a bad thing). However, you will find that the more elegantly-designed sites use fixed width, simply because it's easier to design for a fixed width than it is an unpredictable width.

Usability-wise, fluid-width takes the cake, for sure. I have a 24", 1920x1200 monitor, and with Windows 7's Aero Snap feature, I can get 2 side-by-side windows, each 960 pixels wide. This is annoying, since most sites are sized to fit into 1024 pixels of width (minus browser & window chrome). Fluid-width sites work marvelously in such cases... as they do in scaling down to mobile display sizes. They're just hell to design for.

My apologies, I vehemently despise everything Apple, so I was unaware that the annoying minimise animations etc weren't done by expose. Apple's solutions feel half done and useless to me, as an example, the home and end keys don't even work on a mac, which is seriously irritating. That and the inability to change from the hideous brushed metal. Apple offer a one size fits all solution, and to many, they haven't gotten it right, they have it dead wrong. I'm looking forward to fennec, and flash 10.1..... Because I choose different.

Quite all right, everyone is entitled to an opinion. Just so long as it's not an irrational hatred. I vehemently despise factual inaccuracy, however. You can change the minimise animation to a more regular scale type version, if that's what takes your fancy (since at least Tiger). You can also make it run really slowly by holding down the shift key, but that's not important right now. The home and end keys work just fine on my keyboard. It's an Apple keyboard, though. Perhaps yours was mapped wrong? I agree that the brushed metal theme was hideous, but it hasn't been a part of OS X since Leopard came out. In October 2007. It is possible to change the appearance of OS X, but most people who use it don't generally feel the need to in my experience.

I'm looking forward to Fennec too. I hope it's awesome. Even if I never use it. Because choice and competition is a good thing, and can only serve to improve the platform(s) I do use.

We're WAY off topic here, though. This (the actual article) actually sheds a bit of light on something which was bothering me. Moving the window controls to the left seems like a much better idea when combined with putting the "windicators" on the right to match the panel. Before it just looked like copying OS X for the sake of it. Also: Anything which moves us away from the desktop metaphor is probably a good thing.

PS At least no one is trying to claim that the left panel is copying the Win7 task bar...

I guess I would wonder why they would focus on this since it seems netbooks are a dying market. I suppose this could be the stepping-stone to a tablet-based interface. I agree that things like netbooks and such stalled out, because waiting for an OS like WinXP or Win7 (or Linux) to load up when you just want to check email is annoying. However, this also imitates what Google's trying to do with Chrome OS...provide an instant-on OS for netbooks. Google has a lot more resources to throw at the problem. I give Ubuntu credit for trying, but I think they're spreading themselves a bit thin with all the iterations of their brand (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Netbook Editions, etc)